Development of Parafoveal Processing within and across Words in Reading: Evidence from the Boundary Paradigm

In this study we used the boundary paradigm to examine whether readers extract more parafoveal information within than across words. More specifically, we examined whether readers extract more parafoveal information from a compound word's second constituent than from the same word when it is the noun in an adjective-noun phrase (kummitustarina "ghost story" vs. lennokas tarina "vivid story"). We also examined whether the processing of compound word constituents is serial or parallel and how parafoveal word processing develops over the elementary school years. Participants were Finnish adults and 8-year-old second-, 10-year-old fourth-, and 12-year-old sixth-graders. The results showed that for all age groups more parafoveal information is extracted from the second constituent within compounds than from the noun in adjective-noun phrases. Moreover, for all age groups we found evidence for parallel processing of constituents within compounds, but only when the compounds were of high frequency. In sum, the present study shows that attentional allocation extends further to the right and is more simultaneous when words are linguistically and spatially unified, providing evidence that attention in text processing is flexible in nature.